RIPENING
SEASONS

Issue #31, April/May 1999

A Year for Considering What Was

I guess I've never realized how
fractionally auspicious was the moment of my birth. It occurred very
close to one-fourth into the day that was exactly 2/7ths into the
year that was 3/11ths into the century -- more informatively, just
before 6 a.m. on April 14, 1927.

With '7-come-11' in the denominators, and '1-2-3-go' in the
numerators, how could I have failed in this world? What could have
gone wrong? Maybe I've found the answer in the tailgate brevity of a
newspaper horoscope column that I only discovered 72 years after its
publication...

Thursday, April 14, 1927. Children born
on this day may have an embarassment of talents. Early marriage in
which there is a practical life partner will go far toward
assuring success.

There, you see -- I never got married
until I was 29. And then it was to a most impractical
partner. Had I only known . . .

I'm only kidding, of course. This rush of star-gazing reflection,
along with the fragment of ancient newspaper -- and much more of
same, to follow -- is prompted by a feeling that I need to do
something special for this year, in recognition of the century's
finale; but more as a marker for my own feelings of personal closure,
before the nineteen-hundreds are nothing but an old familiar
shoreline receding swiftly toward the sunset horizon.

It seems to call for some 'coming to terms' that, for all my
frequent indulgence in recollection, I've never really done. I've
just kept stretching the window of remembrance, up to now, so that it
hasn't seemed that long ago . . . to 1985 when I came to Seattle . .
. to the 1970s when I was doing Black Bart . . . even earlier, though
my carte blanche for prior years wouldn't stand much scrutiny
by a careful gatekeeper. But I'll have to begin thinking of it, soon,
as 'back in the 1900s.' The pull of the idea of 2000 -- the
deafening roar of it, all around us -- will simply be too powerful to
resist.

We seldom realize how much we can be affected by idea forms
-- which, of course, allows us to be regularly manipulated by them --
in the hands of the advertising industry, or the PR spin experts.
Just consider the steady encroachment of subtle price increases while
everyone looks the other way: a buck (and more) extra for coffee,
once just a part of the meal, not a separate item; or the way we sit
still for 'shipping & handling,' now, while they boldly promote
the sale as a "Free Gift." But I've switched the subject on you, from
time to money, so let me switch back, and give you an illustration of
how idea forms of time can restructure your sense of
things.

For all the years of my life, the 1800s have existed only in
fragmentation -- events and biographies merely isolated islands in a
vast sea of remote time, related only to other things in their
immediate proximity, and often not even that. I simply could not
place Thoreau's two years at Walden Pond, in the 1840s, in any
conceivable context with Wyatt Earp's 1881 shootout at the OK corral
-- not that there reasonably should be such a context, except that
everything bears a chronological relationship to everything
else . . . but only perceptively so if it registers with us as
experience, and I was not around for any of it, back then.

So here is the idea form, used in a positive way: Now that
we've lived through the better part of a century, and have personal
memories right up to 1999, we have a 'grid of experience' that can be
overlaid on the 19th century. All we have to do is drop the first two
digits (á la y2k). Thus . . .

Two notable Americans were born in the '30s -- Mark Twain ('35)
and John Muir ('38) -- in the decade 'after' my own birth. Each
contributed to the evolution of a changing American consciousness
during the latter half of the century (as I did, in my own small
way). In '94, The Mountains of California, probably Muir's
most noteworthy book, saw publication -- the 'same year' that I came
out with Innocence Abroad. Twain's Innocents Abroad, on
the other hand, was published in '69, gaining him early international
fame as a humorist -- while I, in my plodding way, and eight years
older than Twain, was just experiencing, in '69, the turnaround in
consciousness that would send me toward my life's real work, and the
insights that let me ignore fame. Twain lived on for ten years into
the new century, dying at age 75; Muir went fourteen years beyond the
great divide, to age 76. And I, of course, am now 72. An adequate
preface to where I'm going with this issue.

[Here, in the printed
version of Ripening Seasons, I began laying in clippings
from an April 14, 1927 issue of The Seattle Daily
Times -- clippings that seemed to bear some remarkable
relationship to the life that developed for me. And in the course
of this issue, I proceeded to comment on them. Perhaps at some
later date I shall be able to introduce these clips into the site;
but the commentary fairly well indicates what they were all
about.]

Well, now you see what I'm up to. I want to devote the rest of
this year's issues to a reflective review of what can be spoken of as
My Times. Not the standard stuff that will fill the retrospectives
headed for print, as the year comes to closure, but the hits and
misses of my own life; things that deserve a tribute and will not
likely get it elsewhere. For sure, some of it will be cliché
material, but I'll try to give it all a personal twist.

It will be cued by press clips from the day of my birth, giving
some 'realness' to the span of realities we've come through, and
refreshing the sense of transitional change, whose drumbeat,
unceasing, has long since jaded us all. We no longer tap feet to the
rhythm . . . have forgotten how to dance to it, and too often wish we
could just turn it off. But it's only because we're emotionally
rooted in those years that have vanished.

I would've much rather had San Francisco archives to go through,
but Seattle will have to do. The culture was quite the same, perhaps
a bit more provincial, here, but it will serve our purposes
nicely.

Note, first of all, that price of two cents for a 38-page paper --
we'll be making price comparisons all along the way. This was a bit
of a surprise to me, as I can recall selling papers on a street
corner, around 1937, for 3 cents, and have always thought the
Depression was responsible for those prices . . . but it appears not.
Our Roaring '20s economy had not taken prices through the ceiling,
like the years since 1980 have.

Observe, also, the big number 5 in the masthead corner. That
either means the 5 o'clock or 5th edition for the day! Difficult to
believe, now, but a day's press actually came out in several
editions, to assure readers of the very latest news, and compete with
other papers. Radio hadn't yet hit its stride as a news medium. So .
. . all this, for 2 cents on the tab -- considering that we're the
sucker-bait for what really pays their revenue, that reflects the
most inflated price base that we'll see on this excursion.

The day's big national event, other than a mine flooding in
Oklahoma, was a flight endurance record of 51 hours in the air, by
Bert Acosta and Clarence Chamberlin, who actually blew it by droning
together over New Jersey in safe circles. Either one of them, heading
alone for Paris, could have had the fame of Lindbergh, who did it in
33 hours, five weeks later.

The item below it actually comes from the financial page, but it's
such an excellent demography of the times, that I'm using it as a
front-runner. A land of 113.5 million . . . no wonder things feel so
crowded today! And 35 million adults who didn't work, but were not
considered unemployed! (Read the detailing). This was before Social
Security, yet "upon the earning power of the 38 percent of the
population in gainful employment is dependent...the welfare of the
other 62 percent." No safety net, but those folks lived with the need
to take care of one another! And I'm not so sure, now, that it
wasn't, for all that, a society healthier for its citizens. Social
Security has fostered our sense of independence -- in a certain way
-- but along with it, our alienation and loss of extended family and
community.

Most people earned less than $2000 per year. But with 2¢
newspapers and (as we'll see) automobiles costing less than $1000,
that wasn't necessarily a poverty figure. In fact, a case could be
made that the advertising industry, itself, just beginning to hit its
century stride in those days, has always been the prime culprit in
the ever-climbing wage/price spiral that has pushed the poverty
level, in my lifetime, up to about $8000 per year.

I don't mean to imply that creative display advertising had just
gotten underway, for there were fine (if often wordy) examples of
that going back to the 1880s. But the study of motivational research,
which put the mid-century ad game on a solid footing, got its start
around 1920. Analytical surveys of exactly what worked and what
didn't. You'll never read much about it today, because it's just 'the
way it's done,' now -- but it consists of techniques and subtle
tricks that had to be hacked out of a wilderness of paths that went
every which way.

Our 1927 paper, in fact, has some 'before' and 'after' examples.
On top, we have what may have been all the rage among the senior set
-- for whom it was pretty safe to offer a 15 year guarantee. And it
would be hard to beat their claim of the "lowest prices yet offered."
But it's a throwback ad to the early days of advertising, talking
about "Ohio's Greatest Specialists In This Important Field," yet
using the term, False Teeth, when the usage of "dentures" goes back
well into the last century. One wonders, in fact, exactly what was
meant by "False Teeth for those who know."

And then, below, a fine example of advertising's progress, in
terms of design, execution, and going for the unwary reader with a
hook that can't miss -- although, frankly . . . I've never yet seen
or heard of a man who has much concern for his ankles, as features of
attraction. "...sets them off admirably!" indeed. This really
demonstrates the idiotic lengths to which theory can be carried. But
then, fashion is a flighty, unpredictable muse, and I never thought
I'd see a rage for body-piercing, either. (Nor could I have imagined,
50 years ago, me with long, flowing locks, as an old man!)

I can say one reservedly positive thing for advertising. It
nourished the graphic arts, sharing with the publishing industry an
assumption of patronage -- not out of nobility, to be sure, but give
credit where it's due -- in one of the few instances when
commercialism actually worked for the enhancement of the arts and the
betterment of the human spirit. But...a patronage, sadly, that was on
the wane well before mid-century. Graphic arts rendered by hand gave
way to the photograph, first in publishing, then in advertising. Such
commercial sketch work as remains in use is a highly formulaic thing
that scarcely qualifies as art. And what flourished in the early part
of the century -- not just the craftsmen, but the very craft! -- is
now as extinct as the dodo.

Our century's "march of progress" ran over it like a deer in the
road. There is little real awareness of the loss of an art, for we
see it simply as change. Art has changed, music has changed, literary
style has changed, in the course of our up-tempo century, and we are
too busy keeping up with it all, to even grieve the loss.

Graphic arts are still with us, now an aspect of technology --
indeed, some remarkable work is being done with Photoshop and such
software. I'm sure it qualifies as art (or will, before long) . . .
but when work is done so fast or easily that time cannot be taken to
linger over it, to redraft and rewrite, even a dozen times, even half
a lifetime if it feels necessary -- this is what real art calls for,
by my definition of it. Something polished and refined comes of it,
that will outlast its immediate utility.

In our Crescendo Century, we've run out of time for any such
luxury. These 1927 clips generally take their tempo and time for
granted (naturally), so one has to root around for the evidence of
it, but I found it in a squib that was part of a catch-all column, a
quote from Herbert Hoover, soon to be President, who speaks of the
"almost instantaneous" distribution of films. "It is but a question
of weeks," he says, "between the appearance of a great picture in
Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, and their appearance in New
York and San Francisco." The film, Flying Down to Rio, was still six
years away. What lovely, liesurely innocence!

What's really fascinating about this day-of-my-birth paper is how
it evocatively flashes me through a review of my entire life. It's
almost as if I were born into a set of themes, in which I necessarily
had to participate in order to truly be 'of my time.' It would have
been a different range of items, entirely, fifty years earlier,
whereas these set the stage of my world with a predictive quality
that is almost uncanny.

Like that small conjoint reference to films and South America --
for a reason that I might only guess at, there was a rash of films in
the '30s to early '40s with Latin American themes, implanting in me a
never-fulfilled dream to go adventuring down there. Some of the
earliest books I indulged in were on that motif, and one of my
youthful heroes a British explorer, Col. Percy Fawcett, who had
vanished in the Amazonian wilds, shortly before I was born. As late
as 1946, I was still compiling data for such travels, and it was only
the opportunity of a college paper editorial post, that summer, that
dissuaded me from joining someone on a bicycle adventure through
Mexico -- turning the focus of my world around, and putting the dream
forever after out of reasonable reach.

Even allowing for the rationalized overview that our lives reflect
common themes of the times, some of the specific references in this
birthday paper are so precise as to be spooky. Like the one at the
top, here, on preserving "Old Ironsides" -- a name given to a grand
old American naval vessel, that no one except us oldsters, and maybe
tourists to Boston, would even recognize, today. One of my very
earliest memories is of a first-grade class tour of Old Ironsides, in
1933, when it was moored at Oakland and I was a San Jose schoolkid.
It made a really deep impression on me, and some images still remain,
after 66 years.

Then we have a small item from the financial page, about the Bank
of Italy, that brings back a kind of significant memory. That, of
course, was the Bank of America, in embryo, and I actually did
banking with the Bank of Italy! It was A.P. Giannini's genius to set
up accounts for school kids -- we got a little bankbook, and brought
weekly deposits of five or ten cents to school on the day that the
bank teller came by. That was in 1936, if my recall is accurate, and
I had reached some grand sum of savings like $1.67 with interest
accrued, when I somehow knocked an aunt's pair of glasses over the
table edge to break a screw fitting on it. As I recall, a dollar and
a half of my hard-gained savings went to pay for it, and that was the
end of the banking mystique, for me. It was supposed to teach thrift,
but what it taught me was never to save for tomorrow what you can
spend today.

And below that is an ironic little item that is really a minor gem
in its own right: Henry Ford suffering an auto accident! It served
him right, for having brought the fuel-burning combustion engine to
something less than perfection, forever changing the American
environment, not to mention the daily street scene we have to cope
with. I have my own connection -- not to Henry, but with the
devil-machine that he foisted on the land. It was the only new car I
have ever owned -- a 1951 Ford.

I had my own accidents with it, too. It's interesting, how we
intentionally subject ourselves, with a car, to the risk of bodily
harm, which no sane individual chooses to court, from any other
source. I mean, we try to avoid shootouts, rioting in the streets,
bungie jumps, hitch-hiking (most of us, at any rate) -- but we join
in the freeway madness with daily abandon . . . even though the sight
of a crumpled mass of metal under tow is not really all that rare.
Well, I got mine, more than once -- it's a wonder I'm still alive, as
I think about the close calls that Ford put me through.

And finally, a theme that has been a tormenting thread in American
life for the entire century, touching my own at various points along
the way: the much feared corruption by godless (read:
anti-capitalist) communism. Our cultural preference, apparently, is
wage-slavery, since it provides the chance of breaking free . . .
though precious few of us ever manage it.

What really speaks to me, however, is this Sophie Irene Loeb
column, garnered from the Womens Page (yes, they actually had such a
section, in those pre-feminist times -- and may, still, in backward
parts of the country -- a remnant of the age of chivalry, when women
got their perks without having to fight for them in the hard-knocks
economic marketplace).

Footnote: I know, I know . . . Women
fought for their perks in other venues. At the same time, I think
they misjudged the 'freedom' and glory of the economic
marketplace, and are coming to realize that it cuts people as
badly down as that butt of all battering: patriarchy. We have a
common foe, and I think it's now evident.

What Sophie writes for the gentler, more aesthetic sensibilities
of the womens page could never have seen print in the mens section --
the financial page, say, to which it more pertinently applies. Only
poets could have safely ventured such sentiments, without being
accused of cultural heresy -- by the American Legion, at least. But
she lays out my guiding philosophy, the one that I blindly groped
toward for 44 years, before it fell into place for me. She says it
all, here in this column, on the day of my birth.

She doesn't frame it as radically as I might, to be sure -- it's
couched in the extra daylight hour of April (before DST made it two),
and the magic of spring -- but anyone who can relate to what she says
knows full well how the heart yearns to escape those tepid
boundaries. Even I, for that matter, had to find my path by the route
of necessary limitation. It does not seem possible, when we've been
bound to the grindstone of a daily job for half a lifetime, that it
could ever really be otherwise.

I had to reach the earning power of a technician (ordinarily
scored with some dedicated trade schooling or else a lengthy
apprenticeship, without a college degree -- none of which I had),
before I could see over the income-level barrier that had been my rut
for two working decades. And then, I had to envision the potential of
short-term contract employment, in this newly in-demand field of
programming, to conceptualize the idea of taking large chunks of time
to myself. It began that way, with the thought of earning enough in a
half-year's time to coast for the other half. After what I learned
from the Bank of Italy experience, I could never have managed it by
the nest-egg route, which is the vogue today.

So those of us who respond, with Sophie's passion, to longer days
and springtime, but cannot sit still for just that, reweave our lives
continuously, looking for the right avenue out of the bind. And as we
get closer to it, find that we're willing to make sacrifices we'd
never intended -- maybe never imagined we could -- in order to get
over the last hurdles. Seeing what my addiction to the automobile had
actually been costing me was a big recognition. Being willing to
slice my security ever thinner -- a stage-by-stage process -- took me
even further.

Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be privation and insecurity,
and became a kind of game. I think that happened when I began to
sense that there was something other than pure chance, or my own
wiles, at play in all of this. I don't think one can really be free
of anxiety pressures until this crossover takes place. And once it
does -- well, the rest of your life is your own, never again to be
pushed by anything you really don't want to be doing, or any concern
that you might oneday fall back into that rut. It deserves emphasis,
though, that the necessary insight cannot be gained so long as your
life is entirely at the mercy of economic goals or visions.

But primary to all, I had to first know Sophie's truth, as
expressed in this column, and know how deeply it mattered to me,
before I could even begin to find my way out of the pit that life had
seemed to consign me to.

* I know, I know . . . Women fought for their perks in other
venues. At the same time, I think they misjudged the 'freedom' and
glory of the economic marketplace, and are coming to realize that it
cuts people as badly down as that butt of all battering: patriarchy.
We have a common foe, and I think it's now evident.

For sheer positive impact, and promise hardly yet realized,
nothing in the century supersedes the changes wrought by the women's
movement -- first for gender equality, and at a far deeper level for
a feminized perspective on life. I pointedly bypass the term
'feminist' because I think what we're moving toward will be less
political and more wholistically about how to live: what is worth
living for, how most naturally to achieve it, and how to work
ourselves gradually free of the social quagmires engendered by a
millennium of patriarchy.

In other words, I see this movement as barely begun, and what is
thus far seen of it, only the hard, blunt fighting thrust of some
pretty gutsy women who had to force the issues at political levels.
As a society, we needed to be shaken out of some stodgy ideas about
what we supposed were "natural distinctions" between women and men.
That battle still continues . . . the deeper and more enlightening
one is hardly underway.

My birthday paper annotates a victory along the way -- not here,
but in Britain. Womans suffrage, achieved seven years after it came
in this country, the culmination of nearly a century of persistent,
sometimes violent activism. What's interesting about the article is
the way it tells of the hard-bitten resistance to this reform. No
different than it was, here. In fact, it is amazing to read (from
other resources) some of the hangups that delayed suffrage for so
long, in this country. Objections that women would be coarsened by
the voting privilege (is that how men got that way?), their
femininity eroded. At one point, it failed of a Senate passage
because if black women were included, it would upset the delicate
power balance in the south. A more honest acknowledgment, that,
however, than the south's antebellum claim that slavery was really
good for the Negro.

But back to our topic . . . The paper, in more subtle ways,
conveys the attitudes and patricentric values that were commonly
taken for granted at that time in our evolvement. You may have caught
it in Sophie's second paragraph, earlier, where she quite
unthinkingly observes that women do not "pore over
[household] accounts," but "sew or bake a cake." Here is
another unquestioning instance of it, in Patricia Lee's response to
an overwrought man, writing for advice about how to deal with his
headstrong wife. The advice columnist completely affirms the 'man of
the house,' observing that he "cannot permit her present attitude and
maintain any respect from her."

That's the way it went, in 1927 . . . That's the world I came
into. I like to think that I've pretty much overcome that handicap,
even that I am a feminist from way, way back -- though I know a few
women who would erupt in laughter, at the suggestion -- if not in
tears. I do, however, know that I've always felt an unusually high
envy of women, almost a degree of awe over woman's 'way of being,'
her unique kind of perception. It's made me especially appreciative
of the change underway.